


No Last Words

by SayonaraRevival



Category: DRAMAtical Murder, Subarashiki Kono Sekai | The World Ends With You
Genre: Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-26
Updated: 2014-07-26
Packaged: 2018-02-10 12:37:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2025369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SayonaraRevival/pseuds/SayonaraRevival
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A... slightly different take on Sho Minamimoto's life before the Reaper's Game, long before the events of TWEWY, and the brother he adored yet never really knew.</p>
<p>[ TW: strangulation, stabbing, xenophobia. ]</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Last Words

"Hey, Sho... c'mere."

There's a gentle smile on the other's face. Shaggy, brown hair, a nice caramel color to his skin, and a small white teardrop tattoo on his cheek. There's more white tattoes on his neck, and you really want to reach out and touch them. But you're not young enough to justify that, and he only got them about a year ago. You're twelve, not five. So you just blink, staring at him with curiosity in your face, despite trying to keep it blank.

But then again, your brother pulls you into a hug after you take a step closer. You're so much shorter than him at this point that your cheek is pressed against his chest. He's really warm when he touches you, every time, so you hug back, clinging to that warmth. You're always afraid to reach out and touch him yourself if he doesn't initiate it -- even if it is only to be reassured that someone really cares about you and they're alive and they're with you no matter what.

It's a very silent hug for the most part, although you're confused as to why he did so, but you just focus on his breathing for now anyway. Since your ear is right near his heart, you can even hear his heartbeat. He's... alive. He's there. He cares. The gentle drum beat of his heart is proof enough of that.

"I know our parents are gone again, but they called me tonight. They said we can get ice cream after dinner tonight. They've put some more in my account."

\-- Ice cream? Your eyes widen as you feel his chest rise and fall while he's talking calmly. He lets go and you can't help yourself from grinning as he steps back.

"Only when you finish your homework, though!" His chuckling is always a nice deep sound. His voice in general is really soothing. But you don't need to be told twice. You're rushing off to your room, the video game on the television forgotten for now. He'll save the game for you, most likely -- you know this well because he always does.

When you sit down at your desk, your mind is concentrating entirely on the homework. Most of it is math, and that's become your best subject, with your brother's help. Your drive for ice cream finishes the math homework within fifteen minutes, and the rest of the homework only takes another fifteen. Even though you don't really enjoy the way the school teaches you things, you also know you want ice cream really bad. And you know your brother will be proud of you when you get high marks in your classes. So it's definitely worth the trouble to do the homework -- it always is. 

As you're hurrying out with your notebook, finding your brother relaxing on the couch, you can't help but think he's literally perfect. He's still got that easygoing smile as he talks to one of his friends on the phone, his deep and smooth voice comforting as ever. Someday you'll be just like him. He's perfect, and you want to be perfect, too.

His art is perfect. You want to inspire people like he does. He wants to be a tattoo artist, and he plans to go get some education to do so as soon as he saves the money from his job. (Sometimes you wonder why he was hired with his own tattoos, because they're so visible, but then you remember he's perfect and that perfection must have made an impression on the hiring people.) 

He passed all his classes with perfect scores in school, too. It's no wonder he's able to help you with literally anything your school throws at you, right? He looks over your homework after he tells his friend goodbye -- you're so proud he tells his friend he's going to get some ice cream with you, too -- and the smile only grows as he finds no errors in your homework today.

"Wow, you did great," he's grinning now, ruffling your hair and laughing as you try to swat his hand away. You don't really mind that he does that, because he's your amazing brother and you love him even though he ruffles your hair a lot. "Not a single mistake that I saw, too. Let's eat and go get some ice cream, then?"

"Yeah!" Your voice is so excited that it's almost lame. You don't want to be excitable, you want to be cool and calm like your brother. But it's already out there, and he disappears into the kitchen to fetch the dinner he made for you and him while you were doing your homework.

Your brother's even great at cooking. Tonkatsu tonight, breaded pork slices which you eagerly dip in the sauce and start gobbling up before he reminds you that you're forgetting your manners.

And then you're walking down the street with him, ordering your favorite flavor of ice cream, mint chocolate chip, on a very Americanized chocolate cone. The name is in English but it's long and you don't know what it says, and you're too busy licking the ice cream after you get it to ask your brother if he knows.

And the years pass very uneventfully. Your brother's still perfect, and as you start to learn to cook from him, learn to exercise and keep your body healthy, you grow taller than him by just an inch or two. The schooling system just gets worse the higher in grade you go, and the people still are stupid. The only other ones who get high grades like you do are only in it to get those high grades. They don't care to learn as much otherwise. They are all just happy memorizing facts and not understanding what the point of those facts are, or even how to use them.

That's why you've never had any friends, and that's why you don't want any.

Besides, your brother understands. No one in school could possibly be as perfect as him. You're content with him as your only friend, so what does it matter? You even start practicing your math and science puns in your normal speech at school, just to make it easier when your brother decides to bounce them off you, too. On the off chance that your parents are actually home for once, they just laugh and enjoy seeing their two sons get along so well.

Once, your brother told you he was worried about what your parents thought of him. He became a tattoo artist, and not a doctor or a scientist. Even though he liked those things, that wasn't what he wanted to do with life. And he smiled as he told you then, "They made me promise to make a difference in the world with my art and my tattooing. That's what they want to see from me." He turned to you, too, and ruffled your hair again, even though he is shorter now. "Sho... When you decide what you want to do with your life... promise me that you'll make a difference, too, okay?"

You're not at all sure what you'll be doing when you're twenty-four like he is. But you grin anyway. Yours is lopsided and you can feel it, but you can't really stop smiling when you're inspired to be something in life.

Even if you don't have any other friends, and even if you don't know how you'll make that difference. Maybe if you make it, then you'll see people be inspired too. Like you are.

You're almost eighteen, now, and you have about a week before your birthday. You're excited, but not as much as you used to be. Your parents will be home this time, and your brother scheduled the day off from his tattoo work. It'll be great.

... But then, it isn't. You and him are on the way home, taking a shortcut through an alleyway after picking up some new clothes. He's always been so cool in how he dresses, and he helps you pick out super-cool outfits for leisure time, when you're not in your school's uniform. And there's a group of guys, they're talking loudly and you stare at them for longer than you really should have.

They notice.

"Hey, look. It's them." Apparently, they'd seen you and your brother before. When your brother stiffens and steps forward, his face grim, you wonder if he knows them too. "Still trespassing in our country, huh?" they continued, and you're wondering just why these guys know your brother to begin with. You can't seem to speak when they all move closer.

"Get away from us," your brother warns them, lowly. It's even deeper than usual, but it doesn't sound calming at all. He's basically growling. It's an intimidating sound, but the guys in the group just laugh.

"Heh, real scary there." Another one speaks. "You know, I'm getting really tired of seeing you around here."

Your brother says nothing to that, but you see his hands curl into fists. And you still can't seem to move.

"What do you say? Should I just take you out right here, right now? In front of your baby brother?"

"Sho," your brother says. "If they go after you, run." It's quiet, but it's in that serious tone of voice he's never even used before with you. You know it's serious, though. It's all you can do to nod as a couple of the group pull out knives.

And, somewhere in you, you know this is the end for your brother. But you're frozen to the spot as he steps closer to them, and the fight breaks out. You're like an audience. You can't even speak as two knives drove straight through your brother's stomach, and he cries out this loud, anguished noise that accurately describes how he must feel.

You know it because you feel like there's a knife twisting in your gut, too, even though you aren't being attacked.

Your brother's thrown against the wall, and the guys hold him there as another squeezes the rest of his life out of his throat. Watching in horror, you see the blood dripping from the knife wounds and the life draining from your brother's body.

Your perfect brother. Your only friend. The only person who understood you.

"Mizuki... "

There are tears forming as you watch him try to struggle, and there are tears as the group laughs sickeningly happily, and there are definitely tears as they push you forward to look at him now.

The tears flow freely as you fall to your knees and realize you had done literally nothing to help your brother. And he is gone now, and even though you cling to his body and feel the warmth slowly dissipate, the warmth you will never feel again, the heartbeat no longer there, the calm breathing gone. 

You cry like you've never cried before.

You don't even notice the guys leaving you alone to mourn your brother's death, and you certainly don't notice someone seeing you two and calling an ambulance, and you don't even think as you're pulled away from your brother by the police and you definitely don't remember what you told them.

Mizuki's gone. You, suddenly, even when your parents fly home immediately and take time off work, don't want to live anymore. 

The week they're off passes by in a blur of crying and refusing hugs from anyone and not going anywhere whatsoever, and by the time it's your birthday, it takes you three hours to get out of bed in the morning. Your parents insist that you get up, that they've even bought you something, but you take another half-hour to gather the will to take a shower and end up with pruny fingers from being in there too long.

It's noon, and you think that maybe you've gotten out all the tears you're going to get out, and that the past week has been awful, but you feel numb. It's like your entire drive to be something is gone, as if it died along with your brother. That's probably what happened. 

Those guys took a lot from you for no apparent reason (everything) and you start thinking that you'd like to take their lives from them, too. But that's not likely, and you've never even injured anyone, let alone killed someone before. You probably wouldn't know what you were doing, and just get yourself killed, too.

...

But that didn't sound so bad, really. Maybe, if there's an afterlife, you can just reunite with your brother there anyway.

When the celebration of your eighteenth birthday is over, and your parents are done trying so hard to console you even though you're not even crying anymore (finally), you ask them what the police were doing. Aren't they supposed to be taking those guys out of society?

You really don't like the answer.

They don't know what gang the guys are part of, not yet, and they have very little information about them to work from. There are several street gangs in Tokyo that have a grudge against Filipinos, too, apparently making it harder to find the names of those guys that had killed your brother. And you have the feeling that it's your fault they haven't been found, for not remembering much about them and only remembering your brother and his last words. The words you hadn't even been able to listen to.

It's official.

You're still numb as you decide that today is the day you are going to find them and kill them or die trying. No matter what happens, you aren't going to feel anything but physical pain. You aren't going to feel good or bad if they lay dying, or if you lay dying. It won't matter.

How you are going to kill all of them when they have knives and probably guns doesn't seem important, and the chances of anything resulting besides minor bruises and your own death don't deter you in the slightest. Telling your parents you are going for a walk, you set out right for the same place your brother had died a week prior.

It looks like everything has been cleaned up since, and there was no one in sight. Why the guys would return to this place after they killed someone here really doesn't make any sense anyway, since the police probably had some kind of watch for a while. It doesn't even make sense that there's a gang here to begin with. This isn't a violence-prone area. This isn't even a violence-prone nation. Why did someone even want to do something like this?

You stare at the wall your brother was held against and strangled to death while simultaneously bleeding from the stomach. And you realize you never really met his friends, not even after his death. You realize you never really knew much about your brother to begin with, besides that he was perfect. But maybe he was involved in things you weren't told. And you probably will never know now.

That thought doesn't make you feel bad, though. It'd be nice to know, but you weren't going to wait for his funeral (something your parents mentioned and you didn't really listen to the date of) or for the police to figure everything out. You're already completely empty. You can't feel bad or good anymore.

So, when a head pokes out from around the corner, and you recognize it as one of those guys, you still don't move beyond just staring at him. He's already laughing, and you just stare blankly at him as he approaches you.

"What, you came back? Do you have a death wish, too?"

The genuine curiosity in his voice doesn't matter. Only the fact that he killed your brother matters.

"... You're zetta slow," you tell the guy, looking down. "Don't you have family?"

"Heh, why the question? You don't really get it, do you?" he snickers darkly. "You don't even matter, and neither did your brother."

Your fists only curl because you are going to punch him in the face for saying your brother doesn't matter. Even if you don't understand why he killed Mizuki, he's still going to pay for it. You'll make sure you at least try.

"Getting pissed? Too bad. You and whatever's left of your filthy family should go home where you belong instead."

You're about to punch him, and you slowly look up at him, the void where your passion and your emotions used to be seeming bigger than ever.

"Might want to go, before you -- "

When your fist tries to connect with his face, he catches it effortlessly. His smug smirk is even bigger now.

"-- before you suffer the same fate as that rat you call a brother did."

You try kicking him, but he's still faster, and doesn't even need to let go of your wrist before he is sidestepping that kick and using his other hand to throw you to the ground. Your heart is beating now, the obvious adrenaline rush from danger obvious. It's been building up, but your numbness must have made it impossible to feel. Your eyes are wide, and you grit your teeth while he pins you to the ground, struggling as best you can even though you already know it's no use.

"Guess you gotta go, too, then," he half-shrugs, that amused smirk wider than you thought possible.

His hands move to your neck then, squeezing hard, and it's more pain than you ever felt in your life. How did Mizuki feel when he had two stab wounds to the stomach, plus this? But, you guess it's fine because you're empty anyway. You're just becoming the nothing you feel.

While losing consciousness as the airflow to your lungs is restricted, your vision starts to flicker, and your hands, which had been trying to pry his off your neck, were losing strength. It's too much, and you can't see anything, you're out cold by the time the police pull up again. The suffocation is complete.

... Your brother won't be proud of you. It's your second-to-last thought before you're gone.

But, at least you're finally the nothing you have felt like for the past week.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry about the awkward second-person and present tense.
> 
> This was posted on my RP blog first, a while back; but next to no editing ever actually happened after that, ha ha ha. I reread it but didn't change much, so it's... well, rough on the edges, if you noticed anything.


End file.
